Clarence Page: Paranoid politics continue

Hear ye, hear ye! Sarah Palin hereby
accuses President Barack Obama of the high crime of shucking and jiving or,
more precisely, a “shuck and jive shtick” with “Benghazi lies.”

Evidence? She don’t need no blinkin’
evidence. In the art of paranoid politics, one needs only to raise questions —
and suspicions.

“Why the lies?” she wrote on her
Facebook page about the aftermath of the tragic Sept. 11 attack on our
consulate in Benghazi. “Why the cover up? Why the dissembling about the cause
of the murder of our ambassador on the anniversary of the worst terrorist
attacks on American soil? We deserve answers to this. President Obama’s shuck
and jive shtick with these Benghazi lies must end.”

Predictably, some sensitive souls charged
that the former Alaska governor’s use of “shuck and jive” smacks of racism. But
quite frankly, if all racism were this mild, I think we’d have a much happier
world.

I am much more concerned about Palin’s
central charge. “Benghazi lies” has become like “Obama’s phony birth
certificate,” a bundle of allegations based less on a desire to find the truth
than to feather one’s nest as a five-star foe of the president.

Republicans and other conservatives have
alleged that Team Obama tried to protect the president’s re-election chances by
blaming the attack on a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim YouTube video,
made in the USA, that touched off violent protests in Cairo that day.

Palin’s outrage was set off by a newly
reported State Department e-mail that indicates the Obama administration knew
while the consulate was under siege that an al-Qaida affiliate, not a
spontaneous uprising, claimed responsibility.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and two other
Senate Republicans also wrote recently to Obama, saying: “These e-mails make
clear that your administration knew within two hours of the attack that it was
a terrorist act and that Ansar al-Sharia, a Libyan militant group with links to
al-Qaida, had claimed responsibility for it.”

But not quite. Closer examination
reveals that the e-mail may only have been one of several inaccurate spot
reports on a chaotic, confusing and rapidly changing situation. And Ansar
al-Sharia denied responsibility for the attack, although they praised the
attackers. Modesty is not an attribute for which terrorist groups are widely
known, unless they really didn’t do what other people say they did.

In the meantime, political partisans
back here at home have the luxury of cherry-picking information that raises
suspicions about the administration, even when they sometimes trip over the
facts.

That’s what happened to Obama’s
Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, in the second presidential debate when he
claimed, “It took the president 14 days before he called the attack in Benghazi
an act of terror.” No, the president corrected him by simply citing the
transcript, available on the White House website, of his speech in the Rose
Garden on Sept. 12.

He also could have cited the transcript
of his campaign speech the next day in Golden, Colo., where he was even more
specific about the “act of terror” that “killed our fellow Americans.” Or he
could have cited a CBS’ 60 Minutes interview he taped just before he stepped
into the Rose Garden on Sept. 12, in which he discounted the video and instead
suspected “folks involved in this who were looking to target Americans from the
start.”

United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice
aroused the political right the following Sunday by mentioning the anti-Muslim
video on TV talk shows. But she also added, that “soon after that spontaneous
protest” the best information indicated “extremist elements” joined the mob
“with heavy weapons.”

U.S. intelligence had uncovered evidence
that same weekend that discredited earlier reports of a video-inspired protest
but the new information did not get to Rice before her talk show appearances,
CBS News and Washington Post columnist David Ignatius reported Oct. 19.

All of this needs to be investigated,
but investigations take time. Unfortunately, the worst time for a slow-moving
investigation is during a tight presidential race, but it’s a great time for
paranoid politics.

CLARENCE
PAGE’s column is distributed by Tribune Media Services Inc.

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